Topic: Flexible decision making

Flexible decision making is vital for survival. Animals must continuously evaluate their environment, making choices to maximize future gains. To facilitate decision making, multiple brain regions represent values of choice options and update them based on environmental interactions, connecting past experiences with future plans. Yet, the neural mechanisms generating these representations remain unclear. Here, we hypothesize that the claustrum, a subcortical nucleus highly interconnected with the neocortex, encodes decision variables and aids in sustaining their representations in cerebral cor

Flexible decision making is an indispensable ability for humans. Although neurons in decision-related cortex accumulate relevant information preferentially depending on context, how sensory information represented in sensory cortex is conveyed to decision-related cortex remains unclear. To elucidate this question, we investigated the functional connectivity between sensory cortex (area MT) and decision-related cortex (area LIP) by recording simultaneously from both areas using two electrodes while monkeys performed a switching task.Two Japanese macaques were trained to flexibly switch between